Education or Experience?

Jun

11

2018

By Bruno Lowagie

There’s a 1958 movie, Teacher’s Pet, in which Clark Gable plays a successful, but uneducated editor of a New York newspaper, and Doris Day plays a professor teaching a journalism class. The theme of this romantic movie evolves around which is more important, education or experience? Clark Gable concludes that experience is the jockey, education is the horse.

I’m weary of people who claim that you don’t need an education to be successful. They often refer to Steve Jobs who dropped out of college but forget that many of the design decisions Jobs made at Apple were influenced by some of the classes he took. At the same time, I don’t like people who are afraid to get their hands dirty. What use is an education, if you never put the theory into practice?